PURPOSE:  To improve and promote the livability of all neighborhoods in the La Crosse area.

Home    Contacts    FAQs     Links     Membership     Newsletters     Sponsorship     Surveys     Schedule

Parking

La Crosse is like most modern hub cities around the world. We now have more people who live outside the City who commute to work or school in their cars than who live in the City. When they get here, they want a convenient, inexpensive place to park.

We also have many people who will drive a mile or less, even in good weather out of habit. Often these cars are driven by healthy people who could easily walk the distance if they only took a little more time.

The result is more cars in the City on weekdays than the City was designed to handle. Streets are jammed with cars and our neighborhoods are eaten up a house or two at a time for parking lots that service our major institutions as well as our smaller ones too.

On Street Parking

Most people park their cars, pickups and motorcycles properly, but there are always a few who do not. Often the same people park too close to driveways and alley entrances or too close to crosswalks. There are others who will park in alleys and even other people's driveways.

Parking inappropriately on City streets is not just an inconvenience, it has led to accidents. In residential areas around our larger institutions the streets and even alleys and yards fill up with cars, making it impossible for the residents or their family or friends to park near their homes.

Parking tickets with their accompanying fines are meant to get people to comply, but they don't seem to be working. Some parking fines are scheduled to go up, but not enough that compliance rates are likely to improve significantly. Parking fines in La Crosse are often only half as much as other communities.

Off Street Parking

The parking problem is not just on our City streets. Neighborhoods near many of our major institutions have been decimated to provide off street parking for commuters. Surface parking lots, often without trees or landscaping with high watt security lights on tall poles now sit where families once lived in their homes.

Many of the rental properties in the City have inadequate off street parking for the number of tenants who actually occupy the rental. What once were backyards with lawns, gardens and trees are now gravel or blacktopped parking lots.

Single family homeowners rarely wish to live near either surface parking lots or rentals with large surface parking areas so they leave. Their homes become rentals and the trend continues.

PLAN

We need a comprehensive parking plan that takes into account pedestrian and vehicular safety, emergency access, snowplowing, leaf collecting and street sweeping. It also must look at how off street parking lots are designed too.

Off street parking in residential areas also must be addressed to stop and reverse the trend of turning neighborhoods into densely populated rentals with mostly parking areas and little green space.

© September 2002, Livable Neighborhoods, Inc.., La Crosse, WI USA. All rights reserved worldwide.